It's official. Short of Washington DC regulators suddenly reversing their pro-capitalism mindset for the first time in years Disney has purchased most of Fox. The "Major Six" studios - Disney, Warner Brothers, 21st Century Fox, Universal, Columbia & Paramount - are now the "Major Five". There is a lot to discuss here from what happens to Fox's TV industry - Fox TV, FX - the studio itself, the multiple franchises, Disney now effectively owning Hulu, Disney's future attempt to replace Netflix with their own over-the-top streaming service in 2019 & the threat of a true multi-tiered industry monopoly.

There already has been too little competition in the American film industry. I believe one of the reasons why the “me too” campaign was as effective in Hollywood as it became was the fact that actress’s careers weren’t as easily demolishable with Netflix and Amazon becoming new, major players in the industry, and could provide other sources of income outside of the influence Weinstein and Co. traditionally had over the other studios.

Disney lessening that competition by buying Fox isn’t helping the situation that much. I do see it as an attempt of a studio to unify to squash other competition brought on by Netflix and companies like it.

They aren't trying to own the world. They basically do. Based on 2016 ticket sales (theatrically is still the easiest venue to gather data because it's the oldest and has so many moving parts) this Super Disney would have accounted for over 40% of all tickets sold globally that year.

Also, I would not be surprised if Disney shuts down the majority of Fox's BlueSky Studios, not a benchmark for quality, ICE AGE is their claim to fame, but the studio has a dozen projects in production and thousands of people could lose their jobs. Maybe they'll keep the top producers and turn Ice Age into a lower budgeted streaming series.

PLUS, Disney has only once played with making adult fare - not comic book shit but actual movies - when they acquired Miramax in the mid-90s & even with Harvey Weinstein pulling his shit (not just the rapes) and winning them hundreds of Oscars they didn't feel it gave them enough of a profit margin so they dropped them. Disney will now own FOX SEARCHLIGHT PICTURES who have been one of the premiere homes for mature skewing fare of the past few years - 127 Hours, Black Swan, The Tree of Life, Shame, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, Beasts of the Southern Wild, Stoker, 12 Years A Slave, The Grand Budapest Hotel, Birdman, Wild, Mistress America, Brooklyn, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri, The Shape of Water & dozens more are all projects that I can't imagine Disney with their desire towards max profits would look at favorably. Most likely they would erase the theatrical component and just focus on providing content for Disney Streaming. Which mostly means buying up indies from Sundance. This would mean less middle budget fare from pioneer filmmakers taking risks.

(I need to rewatch Cloud Atlas now, NOT a Disney property, because in the post-apocalyptic storyline the remnants of man refer to all stories as "Disneys". The Wachowski Sisters (who couldn't get jobs as Disney by the way UNLESS they only made movies explicitly about transgender issues) KNEW!!!!)

It will probably take a year for the Disney acquiring to go complete so this is the last year Fox Studios is it's own thing. Disney will start taking command/releasing projects in 2019 (the year they plan to start Disney Streaming, their version of Netflix) so I expect 90% of Fox titles that can't be worked into the MCU will become streaming services (maybe, MAYBE, Ridley Scott can coerce Disney into letting him make the final Alien Prequel with Michael Fassbender because his Scott Free Films has rights to so many projects but after that I see the ALIEN series never returning to the theater again and becoming a streaming series deal only).

Oh, and Bob Iger has extended his contract until the end of 2021. If they don't change the release dates of anything & he doesn't extend again the final film that will be released by Disney under his watch could be..... AVATAR 3.

Disney is going to have a monopoly on everything. Well I am happy that the Fantastic Four/X-Men may make their way back to the MCU. You have to admit this is pretty freaking scary.

No movie studio should have this much power.

I’ll escape now from this world, from the world of Jean Valjean, Jean Valjean is nothing now! Another story must begin!Avatar: "There's a Starman, waiting in the sky. He'd like to come and meet me, but he thinks he'd blow my mind."Phew, I’m not tense anymore… now I’m just miserable.People say "be yourself" but that's bad advice, if we were all to "be ourselves" many of us would stop wearing clothes. -Chuckman

Gendo'sPapa wrote:Also, I would not be surprised if Disney shuts down the majority of Fox's BlueSky Studios, not a benchmark for quality, ICE AGE is their claim to fame, but the studio has a dozen projects in production and thousands of people could lose their jobs. Maybe they'll keep the top producers and turn Ice Age into a lower budgeted streaming series.

I would rather they just shake up Blue Sky and get there heads back in the game animation wise as Bluesky have good ideas its just there delivery just isn't up to par and like Pixar they are just not ahead with the times and don't seem grasp the changing gender dynamics happening under there feet and as bad as they are they not Sony Pictures Animation whose animation always looks beautiful but has terrible story lines and who deserve to have there plug pulled even more so after the Emoji movie stunt they pulled.

Last edited by silvermoonlight on Thu Dec 14, 2017 4:18 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Anywhere can be paradise as long as you have the will to live. After all, you are alive, so you will always have the chance to be happy.

Also of note: The Streaming Wars are going to be the big story of 2019 in the entertainment world.

Disney wants to go big with their Disney Streaming service in 2019. I believe they're already launching a Disney Sports service next year but Disney Streaming is the big story because they want to try and supplant Netflix as the big Over-The-Top streaming service.

Netflix has been moving slowly towards being an Original Content only service for streaming. They don't want to pay the annual licensing fees to feature a show on their services which is why popular acquired staples on Netflix like 30 Rock & It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia have been dropped lately. Netflix doesn't want to pay a fee every year to have a show like Always Sunny on their service when they could try to make their own Always Sunny and have it run forever without any renewal fees or paying residuals - key creatives usually get residual checks from shows/movies they worked on so if per say you had a key role creating Seinfeld you'd still get checks 20 years later for the work you did because the show is in regular syndication but with Netflix the creatives only get paid the once. Financially it's working out fine but with a few exceptions - Stranger Things, the Netflix shows - the acquired content on Netflix far outperforms the Original content. Still, Netflix's plans are working out great for them right now but it's not going to go well for them in about a years time.

Disney was already planning to pull their titles from Netflix at some point next year - children's animation, Marvel movies, Star Wars, etc are all going to be gone from Netflix by Christmas 2018 is my guess and in 2019 will feature on Disney Streaming - and Hulu has been steadily picking up syndicated shows & prestige TV for online streaming. Now that Disney owns Fox though they really corner the market on syndicated shows and prestige TV. The Simpsons, Family Guy, X-Files, and all the hit FX shows like Always Sunny, Fargo, American Horror Story? All Disney property now. (Netflix doesn't give out exact numbers but when American Crime Story: The People Vs. O.J. Simpson hit Netflix it brought in a lot more traffic than anything else on the site....Netflix's BINGE attitude does not create many pop culture phenomenons for reasons worthy of a whole other essay).

And from what they inherit by acquiring Fox, Disney now OWNS 60% of Hulu. . I can easily see Disney with their majority hold strong arm Hulu into becoming a shell of it's former self and all those sweet sweet acquisitions go straight to Disney Streaming. You want every episode of The Simpsons?* It's on Disney Streaming. You want to stream every episode of the new season of American Horror Story? Disney Streaming has got it! Etc Etc. Add on the endless possibilities of brand name films & series Disney Streaming could put on their service - a Pixar movie just for home streaming?, Marvel series that take place in the actual MCU? a Planet of the Apes series? - and they can easily replace Netflix as King of Over-The-Top home entertainment.

2019 is going to be a bloodbath.

* Someone hypothesized Disney could look into doing true spin-offs of The Simpsons. Very likely. Also likely is Disney (finally) ending The Simpsons to save on costs BUT make the final season - which would be a major TV event no matter how much the series has fallen in quality - into being available ONLY on Disney Streaming. They're going to be ruthless in using their brands to draw viewers towards their service and Netflix really can't compete in that regard.

2018: Marvel announces the arrival of the X-Men, Fantastic Four, and Doctor Doom in the MCU.

2019: An executive at Disney stumbles across the forbidden Simpsons script that accidentally incorporates the first page of the akashic record. Within hours the entire Earth is deluged in endless reams of paper recording everything that could possibly happen in Simpsons episode format. Within days the paper swallows the sun. Within a few months the gravity of the combined paper ball collapses into a black hole but continues to increase in size, eventually shearing the entire galaxy apart. Within a few thousand years the people of the andromeda galaxy learn to fear S'imsūn, the eater of worlds.

the prophecy is trueThe wish for respectability, observed spiritual teacher Jiddu Krishnamurti, is the greatest deterrent to selfhood and progress.

The deal includes Fox's stake in the UK-based Sky News. Murdock was only this year angling to take complete control of Sky (through Fox), but now it will no longer be him even if Fox is allowed to proceed with the bid; this much is a good thing™.

"Being human, having your health; that's what's important."(from: Magical Shopping Arcade Abenobashi )"As long as we're all living, and as long as we're all having fun, that should do it, right?"(from: The Eccentric Family )Avatar: Such an angelic fascinator you're wearing, Shinji! (details); Past avatars.Can't wait for 3.0+1.0? - try Afterwards... my post-Q Evangelion fanfic (discussion)

Why Everybody Should Be Very Afraid of the Disney Death Star: “Disney would control as much as 40 percent of the the U.S. movie business, and 40 percent of the U.S. television business”

In a monopoly. The company wins and the consumer loses.

I’ll escape now from this world, from the world of Jean Valjean, Jean Valjean is nothing now! Another story must begin!Avatar: "There's a Starman, waiting in the sky. He'd like to come and meet me, but he thinks he'd blow my mind."Phew, I’m not tense anymore… now I’m just miserable.People say "be yourself" but that's bad advice, if we were all to "be ourselves" many of us would stop wearing clothes. -Chuckman

It's not quite a monopoly yet. See, in order to be considered a possible monopoly threat, a company has to control at least 50% of the market share of its product. Disney and Fox combined would make up about 40% of the film market. That's a lot, but it still leaves room for the other major studios (Warner Bros, Paramount, and Columbia). Now, if Disney decides that even Fox isn't enough and goes after another major media conglomerate (like, say, Viacom, which owns Paramount), that would push its market share over 50%, which would be grounds for an antitrust lawsuit. But I doubt the company's going to get any bigger than this anytime soon. Let me explain why.

The Disney-Fox deal is expected to take a long time to be finalized--it has to be approved, decisions have to be made about what stays under Disney's control and what doesn't, the corporate infrastructure of Fox has to be integrated into Disney, you get the idea. That won't be finished until 2019 at the earliest. After that, Bob Iger--the man who brought Pixar, Marvel, Lucasfilm, and Maker Studios under the Disney umbrella--will step down in 2021. Now, as I established earlier, big mergers and acquisitions are expensive and time-consuming. The big acquisitions Iger made all took place at intervals of three to five years. So don't expect something like this to happen again next year.Think of it this way: When a boa constrictor eats a very large animal, it will often rest for weeks or months afterwards to digest, and during that time it will not eat at all. Disney is like a boa constrictor that has just swallowed an animal nearly as large as itself, and now must wait a long time for its acquisition to be fully integrated.

Life can seem a challenge. Life can seem impossible. It's never easy when so much is on the line.

Also I expect them to license stuff and make their own shows/movies for their new streaming service, which this is all about. It’s not just gobbling up IPs. Disney doesn’t actually need the X-Men, and Doctor Doom isn’t worth that much money.

the prophecy is trueThe wish for respectability, observed spiritual teacher Jiddu Krishnamurti, is the greatest deterrent to selfhood and progress.

As it stands right now, there's just one company that rivals Disney in the number of fields of entertainment it covers-- Comcast, the only media corporation bigger than Disney. They own Universal Studios (both the actual film studio and the theme park), DreamWorks, Illumination Entertainment, NBC, and Fandango, among many, many other things. That said, if it comes down to those two companies duking it out, I'd rather take my chances with Disney.

Life can seem a challenge. Life can seem impossible. It's never easy when so much is on the line.